Beverley Costa

Dr Beverley Costa grew up in a multilingual and cross-cultural family. After qualifying as a psychotherapist, she set up Mothertongue multi-ethnic counselling service (2000-2018) for multilingual clients.

In 2009 she created a pool of mental health interpreters, in 2010 she established the national Bilingual Therapist and Mental Health Interpreter Forum and founded The Pásalo Project in 2017 www.pasaloproject.org to disseminate learning from Mothertongue. In 2013, Beverley established “Colleagues Across Borders” offering support to refugee psychosocial workers and interpreters based mainly in the Middle East and Eastern Europe.

She is a Senior Practitioner Fellow at Birkbeck, University of London and has written several research papers and chapters. She won the 2013 British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy, Equality and Diversity Research Award with Jean-Marc Dewaele.

She has delivered training and run supervision and case discussion groups for statutory and voluntary sector health and social care organisations for the past two decades. She has also offered management support to individuals in the UK and internationally. In 2017 and 2018, she was awarded funding from The National Lottery to provide training for small organisations, which otherwise could not afford training and supervision in multilingualism. In 2018, she contributed as a research consultant, to the Language for Resilience Research Hub for the British Council, on the importance of language for refugees and IDPs.

Beverley has produced a play about a couple in a cross-language relationship for the Soho Theatre, London. In 2020 she received a Paul Hamlyn Foundation grant to create a free online training course on multilingualism and mental health: https://www.pasaloproject.org/multilingualism-mental-health-and-psychological-therapy---course-content.html.

Her book Other Tongues - psychological therapies in a multilingual world was published in 2020 by PCCS Books.